U.S. News & World Report’s 2018–2019 Best Hospitals rankings place Keck Medicine of USC hospitals among the top 50 nationwide in nine specialties, the top three in Los Angeles and the top seven in California.

University of Illinois at Chicago researchers have received approximately $2 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health to develop a better way to regenerate bone or tissues that have been lost to disease or injury.

The American Thyroid Association has awarded a 2018 Research Grant to Miles Miller, PhD, principal investigator at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Systems Biology and Assistant Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Miller’s research project is titled “Co-opting tumor-associated macrophages in anaplastic thyroid cancer to enhance immune-checkpoint blockade response.”
Treatment of advanced metastatic cancer has seen a revolution over the last several years, as new therapeutic strategies have become successful at harnessing the power of the immune system to durably attack malignant and mutated cancer cells. Immune-checkpoint blockade therapies targeting programmed-death 1 (PD1) signaling on T-cells have been successful in the treatment of solid cancers, including heavily mutated melanomas and lung cancers. Unfortunately, these treatments only work in a fraction of patients, and resistance is often associated with the presence of a type of tumor-promoting imm

The American Thyroid Association has awarded a 2018 Research Grant to Stephanie Behringer-Massera, MD, Clinical Fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Behringer-Massera’s project is titled “T regulatory cells in thyroid-antibody-positive pregnant women.”
A fetus, which shares half its genetic material with the father, is considered a foreign body in the mother’s womb. The only way that it can implant in the uterus without being rejected is if the mother’s immune system is suppressed, which happens through T-regulatory-cell action. The more T regulatory cells (Tregs) are released, the more the immune system is suppressed and the more likely the pregnancy can successfully be brought to term. In women with autoimmune thyroid disease, this process is disrupted. These women are found to have an abnormal Treg response to pregnancy and have Treg levels as low as women who are not pregnant. They are more likely to have miscarriages in the first trimester.

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Although national guidelines advise doctors to discuss the benefits and harms of lung cancer screening with high-risk patients because of a high rate of false positives and other factors, those conversations aren’t happening the way they should be, according to a study by researchers from the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Researchers at Duke Cancer Institute have tracked the missing T-cells in glioblastoma patients. They found them in abundance in the bone marrow, locked away and unable to function because of a process the brain stimulates in response to glioblastoma, to other tumors that metastasize in the brain and even to injury.